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I’ve heard it uttered in learned circles that wisdom departs from knowledge and coalesces into singularity at the moment that its holder perceives the vastness of all that they do not know. If such is the case, then Socrates and Plato, Voltaire and Descarte finally have their rightful heir– me.
I had always been a fair student- better than most, but never challenged enough to properly engage my higher functions. Make no mistake– I was smart. I simply never saw the purpose of validating one’s existence solely by alphabetical scoring on academic trivialities. While most others would wallow in their studies, I reveled in my ability to attend class and then perform as I might. In a cosmic sense, formal schooling was pointless; it was nothing but a series of hoops to be cleared, and I could clear them all with but the twitch of my little finger.
At a certain point, the formality of the scholastic environment began to hinder my grander academic pursuits. I recognized the need to continue my schooling to placate my widowed mother, but I was slowly counting down the days until I could snag that useless piece of paper and kiss it all goodbye. Then, as my peers made their ways into other institutions or otherwise lives of blue-collar malaise, I could truly begin my studies of this vast wide world and the grand sphere that we label “the infinite”.
It was my sophomore year when providence smiled upon me and revealed that graduation need not be the start to my true education. We were in physical education that day, and our instructor told us that we would be beginning a program mandated by the wisest of all institutions: the federal government. The subject: alcohol and drugs. The reason: to ensure that we understood the dangers that they posed on our impressionable minds. The result: a crash course in modern-day folklore and the beginning of my journey to enlightenment.
I had heard about drugs, of course. I don’t see how one could have lived through the 1980s without learning of their existence or the official party line on the subject: that they are bad, and that winners simply don’t do them. What I hadn’t considered previously, however, was that this party line was a fallacy, and that there were ulterior motives to discouraging their use. Sitting in that class, though, all became clear: I reasoned that if academia, the waste of so many of my precious hours, was intent upon preventing their students from doing something, then the forbidden object must have some unknown quality that troubled them. To discourage the use of opioids or other such chemical, I understood. We lived in a city and I had seen enough homeless junkies on my walks to and from school to see the dangers inherent to enslaving oneself to chemical compulsion. The psychedelics, however– well it was here that our academic overlords revealed their hand. They told us that these drugs were used to “expand the mind,” and to never ever partake for fear of horrors befitting a drunk in the fit of the shakes. While the thought of a “bad trip” seemed less than desirable, there was a virtuousness to these chemicals, it seemed. They were used to gain enlightenment, to broaden one’s mental horizon, and that was exactly what I was after.
For once, I didn’t go straight home after school. Instead, I made my way to the public library to begin my research. I was shocked by my findings: it would seem that countless scores of mighty minds, former presidents, visionaries, even Aldous Huxley, had all dabbled in chemicals of all varieties. What baffled me, however, was the disconnect I saw from the likes of they, and the imbecilic ramblings of others so well-traveled in our community. Many of them had lived through the 1960s and had stories of transcendence that wound around themselves to the point of unintelligibility. I made a vow, then and there, that were I to continue on this path, I would never allow myself to succumb to that fate. I would never become a self-possessed “enlightened” stoner, wise in my own eyes whilst my head was planted firmly in my ass.
Salvia was my first. It was legal, easy to buy, and remarkably cheap. It also knocked my on my ass. To go from zero to sixty in the span of a few seconds and then suddenly be somewhere else entirely– good God! My perception and consciousness ebbed away into something vast and unknowable as nostalgia and longing, comfort and fear, the deepest things known only to my soul all exploded before my mind. And then it was over. Only five minutes had passed, and I hadn’t taken more than one hit of the stuff.
I didn’t go to school for an entire week. Instead, I was contemplating the geometries of my nascent childhood and noting how my perception of time was so malleable. Five minutes a trip, a trip that felt, often, like a lifetime. How much could be learned from such a drug, and how much more from a drug that wasn’t legal? I needed to find out.
It all came easily enough. Once you have a certain number of a certain type of life experience, you begin to notice new faces that you had previously ignored. A new type and kind of friend, all on the same metaphysical path, some further along than others, and all longing to share their findings. What’s more, one or two of them will always “know somebody,” or at least “know somebody who knows somebody.” At that point, you’re all set: just lend an ear, smile and nod, and it becomes very easy to get what you want.
By the time I graduated from high school, I’d done it all, at least the popular stuff. Lysergic acid diethylamide, psilocybin- distilled and in its organic medium- and mescaline. All transcendent, all divine, with only a few bad trips that in no way spoiled the bunch. I would have smoked more grass, but stoners did not agree with me. I could never stomach their incessance about “how it is” nor their lamentations of the world’s ills whilst none of them seemed to get out of bed before noon nor willing to find a job. Not me. I never once entertained the notion of kinship with them. I smiled, I nodded, I lent an ear when it benefited me, but I was never one of them. I was on a mission.
I didn’t go to college. I didn’t need to. I elected, instead, to join up with a burn out my cousin ran with to travel the country going to music festivals. “Total uninhibited radical expression!” My ass. As long as you were far left of sunset and scared of chemtrails, it was as open a forum as you could ask for. Anyone else could “fuck off and die.” I could play along.
Just as with the stoners in high school, I smiled and nodded, but added a sob story to my repertoire whenever the subject of money, gas, or food arose. Bless their bleeding hearts, they ate it right up. Romance? I wouldn’t call it that. Conquest is a more apt description, and it was remarkably easy in the crowd I was running with. The same rules applied as anything else. I almost felt bad for how thoroughly I had taken them all in. Almost, but truth is relative to self, and my experiences had lead me to conclude that empathy was for fools. I could recognize it, exploit it, but would never stoop to directly employ it. Transcendance was my mission; all else was disposable.
We were out near Guadalupe at a burn when I first heard about Baphomet. My gracious host had gone out to comb the Agave for peyote buttons, and I had convinced a young lady from New Orleans to show me the sights. I was fifteen hours into a trip and totally exhausted, but she wanted to dance, and I knew well where it was headed. Before we could consummate our dalliance, however, someone fired a gun nearby, and I quickly lost my conquest in the ensuing stampede. I likewise lost my ground and wound up in the mud with a deep gash in my side. A broken bottle, most likely.
I set myself to crawling out of the mud and wound up snagging a loose shirt for a bandage from a couple of tents nearby. I knew the trip was hours to go, so I staggered back to our campsite and bedded down to wait for the end. As I drifted into a troubled sleep, the fire danced upon my eyelids, and memories of childhood, and the sound of my mother’s weeping at my father’s funeral, filled my mind.
I woke up before dawn, and the camp was quiet. I must have still been tripping– my mother’s sobbing was still ringing in my ears and it was just getting louder. Then I realized it, it wasn’t a hallucination, someone nearby was actually crying. It had been a long enough night, I wasn’t going to investigate. It was all I could do to hope that whoever it was would shut up eventually and leave us all be. She didn’t, and I never did go back to sleep. Instead I lay silent for hours as my cousin’s friend tried to calm the woman down. She would not be comforted, however. She insisted that “it was all her fault.” Her boyfriend, you see, had been the one who fired the gun: straight into his temple. She was insistent that it had been a drug that drove him to it, and that she had given him the drug. The drug in question?
She called it, “Baphomet.”
A few weeks later I was thrown off of the bus tour; it seemed that I had lost my charm. Fortunately, we were outside of Los Angeles then, and I rightly figured that I would be able to find another mark fairly easily. Sure enough, I fell into the arts scene and, armed with a brand new sob story about being abandoned on the West Coast, drugs, sex, and room and board came easily. The L.A. crowd was far and above anything I had known before. They had traveled further and deeper on the road to enlightenment, and were more than willing to show me the way. None of them had ever heard about Baphomet, however..
“Baphomet,” what a name! It wasn’t a droll title like “grass,” or “acid,” or a clinical label with numbers and letters like a research chemical– Baphomet was a name with poetry, with substance. Infernal. It smacked of the essence of my own psychedelic travels. Nobody had ever heard of it, though. It was less than a rumor, but I couldn’t get that name out of my head. Baphomet: the phantom drug that drove a man to suicide. It must have been some heavy shit. I would lie awake contemplating that. What doors of perception did Baphomet open to that man that would drive him to end his life? Surely he went in too deep; he simply couldn’t handle true enlightenment.
Years passed, and I with them. I planned to write a book about my travels and my quest for the infinite, but my life had become a whirlwind of bus stops and roadsides as I picked my way across the states, taking in whatever truth there was to find. I would scribble down all that I learned when it came to mind, which wasn’t often. The research was simply too enthralling, and there was always more of it to do. Every city and every town had its own variants and local fare. I had to partake of it all because I knew that sooner or later, I would find Baphomet.
I found my way to New Orleans, and started cruising Bourbon street hoping to find that lady I had lost back in the desert so long ago. I knew it was futile effort, but most nights, if I drank enough and didn’t think too hard, whoever I was with fit the bill perfectly.
And then one night, I finally found her– or at least one close enough to be satisfied. We were heading to her hotel, and took a side street near the Jean Lafitte center. I stopped dead in my tracks, because graffitied on a dumpster near the street was what I had been searching for, that glorious infernal name: “Baphomet.” I said it out loud.
The girl’s eyes flashed, and I saw in them the same emotion that I had heard in the weeping back in the desert, and that I have always felt in my darkest of nightmares.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“That name. You’ve heard about it?”
“I’ve heard that it was a rumor.”
She just shook her head. I was definitely losing my touch. My usual stories didn’t do much to get her to open up anymore, and she wound up getting a cab back to the hotel, leaving me alone with my thoughts and the New Orleans night. That was alright. I had finally found Baphomet’s hometown, and that meant that my education was about to reach the next level.
I couldn’t sleep that night. Everytime I closed my eyes I saw shapes in the blackness, thousands of writhing shades begging me to shut the hell up about the name that I couldn’t forget. “Baphomet.” That girl had known something that nobody in any head shop, rave, or at any music festival had known. She knew about Baphomet, and what she knew scared the hell out of her.
Things got hard in New Orleans shortly after that night. Folks kept talking about some storm heading in and how the levees wouldn’t hold back the sea. I bounced a check and lost my room and was left wandering the waterfront and French Quarter, staying dry as best as I could. I didn’t have any intention of throwing in with the rail kids and hitching a ride out of town, I would weather the storm alone if I had to. “Let the rats flee the ship,” I thought, “I’ll find Baphomet by myself.” I hoped it was soon.
There were no more drugs then. You had to have people around to get them, and I seemed like the last person in town. It was a good thing though, because I had definitely lost my touch and couldn’t seem to talk to people like I used to. I wrote it off that I had ascended so high in my travels that my common utterances flew well over everyone’s heads. That’s what I told myself. I was enlightened, and there was but one final frontier. Baphomet.
Rains got harder and I started hearing sirens a lot, so I kept my mind busy turning over the facts: that night at the burn. That girl was from New Orleans, and that guy had been taking Baphomet. That other girl got scared in New Orleans, she got scared by Baphomet. And here I was in New Orleans, staring down a storm with one last quest to conquer: Baphomet. It made sense. Made a lot of it.
I was curled up on the emergency stairs of an empty parking deck near some Indian casino one night when I heard something funny: a walking bass line played on a tuba, a big drum keeping time, an old banjo strumming, and a trumpet bouncing along: “When the Saints Go Marching In,” New Orleans style. I looked around from my perch and saw nothing. The streets were empty, same as always, and that music sounded far away. I had probably dreamt it, or thought it, or whatever. It had happened before. Though, I couldn’t have, because just as I gave up hope, I noticed it: there was a light flickering in one of the windows at the decrepit high-rise across the way. The place had been abandoned, condemned, but perhaps not.
I hadn’t seen anybody in so long, but maybe I had one last hustle left in me; just enough to get on in and get warm.
The doors were boarded, windows too, but there was only a piece of plywood keeping the rain from a hole down at the basement level. I got in easy.
The place was warm and wet, and the winds outside made the building creak and moan. It was dark, except for a flickering light at the end of the hallway. Someone was standing in the stairway holding a lit candle, just out of view. I walked towards the light, but it moved away and up the stairs. I followed after it, but couldn’t keep up. Each time I thought I could turn a corner fast enough to see who was holding the light, the the candle’s cast light ebbed away around the next corner and continued upward, only ever illuminating the floors above me, never my own.
After an eternity of climbing, I found myself at a dead end, just one long hallway of boarded up apartments leading to a broken window overlooking the rising waters. Except they weren’t all boarded up. There was one apartment whose door was freshly painted. It was almost new, and what’s more, there was light coming from underneath it and the sound of “When the Saints Come Marching In” playing somewhere out in the dark.
I was exhausted.
And still the building groaned like a vast creature of the deep, and my sweat did little to relieve the hot and humid air.
I walked to the door. All sound stopped.
I pushed the door open.
In that moment, a lifetime.
But, there she was. That beautiful young woman from the desert way back when, looking just as she did the night we met.
She had candles all around her, and an old mattress set up in the corner. She smiled at me, and I couldn’t resist reciprocating.
“Took you long enough,” she said as I stepped inside.
“Got kinda lost…” I responded.
She took my arm, and I realized how wonderful it was to feel another person’s touch once again. She lead me to the mattress and we sat down together, both beaming at one another. “There’s a storm coming,” she said.
“One for the century, I heard.”
She bit her lip, then just kept on smiling, then looked towards the wall. “Do you want to know what it is?”
I looked too– and sure enough, there he was: Baphomet, the god not the name, painted in gang colors on the worn brick walls. I considered his form and figure, it had been so long in the waiting that I hardly knew what else to do.
“More than anything else.” I answered at long last.
She gently pushed my chest. “Here you go, just lie back, close your eyes, and open your mouth.”
I obliged.
A small blotter, sour and sweet, cool and burning, touched my tongue.
“Have a nice trip.” She said, and kissed me.
Thunder crashed, and the lights went dead; and that last cacophonous clap echoed forth in a million ways as I ebbed into myself. One second, amplified into eternity. All the burning, all the sweat, all the pain, all the fear, and all the “oh holy shit” of everything terrible and all the empty beds and all the tears I’ve shed and every cut and every sore and every sorrow and all the everything everything everything everything.
And Baphomet.
And here I am, in that echoing second for I know not how long, for that second, once rung, has had no end. And I know, now and forevermore, that I am truly wise. For there was so very much that I never knew, and the time for learning has passed.